California Coast & Ocean

On June 7, Martin attended a workshop with the agency's wardens and chief biologists at the Monterey County Agricultural Center in Salinas. Scores of farmers packed the room, along with officials and representatives of industry groups and environmental agencies concerned with what's happening to Central Coast agriculture.

"Buyers are concerned about animal tracks from deer, pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats," Martin told the gathering. "Say you've got a 20-acre block of head lettuce or romaine out there and all of a sudden you're two days from harvest, and you go to the field and there's a lot of animal tracks. The deer came in the night before. They may not have done anything. They just walked through the field. But it's up to the scrutiny of the buyers, who can say: 'You know what? I don't want that deal.' So we're forced to protect our ground from these 'animals of significant risk' and put up fences. You can't [fence around] every little bend [in the river], and you don't want to forfeit a bunch of farmland that you're already using. So you're going to cut some corners in riparian habitat. Nobody wants to talk about this issue. We've never had to be concerned about this before."

Martin was a leader in voicing farmers' concerns to Western Growers as it developed its guidelines, and he now serves as a technical advisor to the organization. Over the years, he has worked with a number of nonprofit organizations and governmental agencies that seek to protect water quality in the Salinas Valley. Like many growers, he finds himself in a crossfire between environmental and food industry interests. He worries that the buyers who are demanding stricter measures are far removed from the realities and consequences of what they are asking.

His views were echoed by many growers at the Salinas workshop, including Benny Jefferson, another member of the Farm Bureau Board and chairman of the Salinas River Channel Coalition. "Anyone from Costco here?" Jefferson asked from the podium. "Wal-Mart? Safeway?" Nobody answered.

Nobody from the industry was there to help the farmers who feel trapped between food safety guidelines they must follow to earn their livelihood and resource agencies' rules they must violate to comply with industry metrics. Nor have Fish and Game or Water Quality Board staff provided clear answers to the farmers' dilemma.

Local regulations prohibited fencing over six feet high along the river until July 10, when the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, under pressure from processors, passed an "interim urgency" ordinance allowing eight-foot fences. The Monterey County Herald noted that the new ordinance waived both 50-foot setback requirements and state environmental regulations.

The pressures on growers are mounting. Vegetation removal in the name of food safety is also a concern for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which has been warning growers about encroachments on land abutting state highways. Caltrans District Director Richard Krumholtz wrote the Monterey County Farm Bureau last spring that his department had observed an increasing number of ranchers and farmers removing plant life "in direct violation of Caltrans vegetation management policies, environmental law and permits."

It's Counterproductive
"The industry is still in crisis mode, and they are making tremendous errors in standards," said Kirk Schmidt, a former owner of Quail Mountain Herbs, who represents agriculture on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's Advisory Council. "It will take at least a year to undo the screwups before we can talk about restoring environmental requirements to the [food safety] auditing standards. The most important single thing you can do to improve water quality is to keep the sediments on your field, and the second most important thing is keep irrigation on your fields. And that's easier with grassy buffer strips and grass roadways." Farmers along the Salinas River are being forced by the bigger produce buyers to remove these, according to Schmidt, even though such vegetative buffers mitigate the hazards of toxins, including E.coli.

"There's a ton of evidence," said Dr. Charles Benbrook, "that buffers are effective in filtering out pesticides contained in runoff, and recent studies suggest that 40-foot-wide riparian shrubs and thick grass cover filter out large quantities of E. coli."